Chapter 5

It came as no surprise to anyone when Edmondo eventually died. He had not enjoyed his last few months, being trapped in a body he could not control. I could see his anger in his eyes and tried to talk to him about good things to keep him happier.

The funeral was lavish, to say the least. It was held in the biggest church in the city and there were people outside after the place was filled. The front row was set aside for Juliana, Isabella, her child and I. It was strange sitting there, grieving for a man who had given me everything so that he could maintain his status, next to a woman who now was certain I was her long dead daughter. Me, a street urchin gangster who now controlled a multi-million company, and who regularly dined with the members of the government; grieving for a rogue and a murderer who I now loved more than my proper father.

The wake lasted three days. There were so many who wanted to pay their respects we needed to allocate times they could visit. One such visitor was the elderly patriarch of a previously rival gang that had seen what we had done and gone a similar route. He was attended by his youngest son, a strapping, handsome but shy boy around my own age. While his father spoke to my mother, I spoke to him. He was also called Pablo but I was not superstitious about names.

After a few minutes Juliana said that she would like to continue her conversation and asked us if we could take a walk. Pablo and I went out into a secluded garden and chatted. He told me that he had three brothers who ran their business and that his father was really only a figurehead these days. He wanted to know how I, as a woman, managed to hold my own in what was considered a man’s world. I put on my best pout and he apologised. It was then I said “You just backed down; round one to me” and we laughed.

We were in mourning for a month and I came to like how I looked in black and started to wear it more often, especially in the evenings. Pablo started to squire me around to the parties and balls and I must say we made a good looking couple. Eventually we became lovers as well as good friends; my life was looking up again. This time did not go the way of the other Pablo; this Pablo had no desire to create a family or a dynasty. He was happy with me as I was and it was good. He was kind and gentle and complimented me when I looked good. We married in the biggest church in town and, again, there were people outside after the doors had shut.

Our honeymoon was just as a honeymoon should be. We made love in fifteen countries at night and, by day, looked at the sights and weighed up any opportunity we could see. We came home to a separate building in my old home that had been used as a guest accommodation. It was big enough for us and near enough to the action to keep us interested. And Pablo got very interested after I had started showing him the scope of our enterprise. He was even more interested in Isabellas’ shop and spoke to her, quite knowledgably, about design and fabrics.

That was when I wondered about his secrets and asked him straight out one day. Was he a closet gay, was I just a trophy wife? We still had good sex and lived very naturally as husband and wife but I just had to know. That’s when he delved into an old box of his toys and pulled out some sketchbooks to show me. From a very early age he had been drawing dresses. He told me that the circles that he grew up in were filled with fashionable ladies in gorgeous clothes and he had become engrossed in how the dresses flowed, shimmered and hung. He did say that he was turned on by them as he got into his teens and drawing sexy outfits generally brought him to satisfaction.

This did answer another thing that I had wondered about; his ardour after we had been to an event when I was in a particularly good gown was something special. I told him that I would, from now on, wear things that he liked and also asked him if he could make up some of his designs. We went to see Isabella and she directed us to a couple of her trusted seamstresses and Pablo spoke to them, showed the designs he had picked out and they made three dresses in my size with me having some input with the colours that worked best with me. One, of course, while not black, was a midnight blue creation that would look good on a red carpet and that was where it made its debut

The affair was the first night of a film about Simon Bolivar and it took place at the main theatre in town on July 20th, the Independence Day holiday. I was photographed and interviewed and, when I was asked who supplied my gown, I told them that it was made locally and the designer was my husband who stood beside me. I then said that if there was enough interest people could order their own through Isabella at her shop.

That was the beginning of his career as a designer to the society doyens of Barranquilla and then beyond. A Pablo gown became the thing to wear if you could afford it as we made sure that they were only worn by the very rich. Isabella needed to move to bigger premises so I looked at the places we still owned and moved an import/export office to a modern warehouse that I bought at the docks. The location was ideal as being just out of the city and had a big warehouse attached which could be redecorated. The import/export business was much closer to where it did its main work and they were happy that I thought enough of them to give them a new home.

Where they had been, however, was subjected to a total make-over. Where Isabella had previously worked from a shop-front with a small storage room out back; in a main street location where she could have walk-in customers; she was now a bit more out of the way and there was just one bullet-proof window with the outfit of the day showing. To view her new lines customers needed to either phone ahead for an appointment or else be contacted by Isabella who told them that she had something they should see.

For an extra substantial fee, a customer could ask for Pablo to design something unique and we guaranteed that no others would be made like it. Pablo was in seventh heaven, I was being well serviced and Isabella was doing very well. She was then becoming more of a social butterfly than she had been with Eduardo. A couple of years later she was out with a man that she was seeing when they went into a corner on the coast road too fast and ended up crashing head-on into a large lorry. Both were killed outright. The guy had always been considered a good driver previously, much better than Eduardo had been and it may have been that, when they were pulled out of the wreck, the paramedics noticed that she had no panties on and his hand was under her skirt.

In her will she left the business to Pablo and he spent a lot of time there, drawing and being the couturier of note that he should have been a long time earlier. I was busy with the rest of the business and also with Ademir, the baby I had saved all those years ago. He had been growing up being looked after by a nanny more than his mother and I had sat with him many times as he played. He really considered me more of his mother than Isabella, the gad-about. Pablo and I adopted him as our son and heir. He had more connection to the family than anyone else, being the grandson of Edmondo. I made sure that his schooling was good and that he was good at his studies. As he grew into his teens he became a very handsome young man and certainly looked every inch a Clavijo as he stood with me and Pablo, and what remained of the original gang at his grand-mother Julianas’ funeral. Here we were, back in the biggest church in town, saying goodbye to yet another wonderful person who had accepted me as her daughter and had used me to rid herself of her original guilt.

As he entered his twenties Ademir was well versed in the family business. He did not know that I was anything other than Julieta, his aunt. He had been told about the day he was saved from being trampled and, on his twenty-first birthday, the three of us went to the grave of Aiden Ademir Gomez, the person who had saved his life, and laid flowers on it. I had been making sure that the gravesite had been looked after and every time I went there I thanked the unknown person who had given their body to be buried in my place.

Pablo always thought that I was doing this to honour the person who saved my nephew and there was now no-one left alive who could say any different. When he was thirty I passed the entire business over to Ademir, moving out of the family compound to a villa overlooking the sea where I could entertain the cream of society and also entertain older men of wealth with wives who no longer interested them. Pablo, by now, had succumbed to the need to wear his own creations in private and had converted part of the shop to his own accommodation where he also began to entertain husbands of rich wives who bought their gowns there. Ademir met, and married, a lovely girl from one of the other rich families. I thought it funny that I was sometimes entertaining her father while Pablo was entertaining her brother. Sometimes society is too self-contained.

I did, in the end, put together enough men to take part in the ‘Joselito se va con las Cenizas’ competition that had caught my imagination so many years before. I planned it meticulously as I was in hospital, my lung damage from my youth coming back to see me off. The whole group of crying widows will be men dressed in black by a now aging Pablo. It will be the final event of the years’ Carnival of Barranquilla and my coffin will be consumed by a big bonfire. It took a lot of string-pulling and a little bit of bribery to pull it off, but, unfortunately, I will only be there in spirit. The body in the coffin will be mine, dressed, in the end, as a man depicting Joselito Carnaval. It will be only fitting that I was going to be farewelled as someone other than Julieta as even Julieta had never been who everyone thought she was.

Marianne G © 2021